The 2009 Brand My Business Contest
June 6, 2009 by Urbanham Business
Filed under Advertising and Marketing, Featured |
Get ready for your chance to win a $5,000 Marketing Package for your small business! If you have a small business and need a branding campaign or an existing small business and would like to refresh your look here is the chance to win over $5,000 worth of branding and marketing services!
What you can win!
- A professionally designed website ($ 2,500)
- 5,000 full color fliers or 5,000 mailers ($ 350.00)
- 1,000 full color business cards ($ 150.00)
- $ 2,000 worth of advertising on Urbanham.com
Contest begins June 10, 2009 and here is what you need to do to enter.
- Simply add your business to our small business directory. Click here.
- Then create a short video (30 seconds or less) promoting your business. Remember to include your name, services offered and contact information in the video. Videos must be 30 seconds or less and can be created with your video camera, digital camera, web camera or cell phone. Feel free to be as creative and entertaining as you would like!
- Email your video to brandmybiz@urbanham.com using YouSendIt.com
Officials Contest Rules to be posted on June 10, 2009. So get started today and tell your family and friends that also have businesses about this great opportunity!
5 Tips to Survive Today’s Economy
April 7, 2009 by Urbanham Business
Filed under Business Tips, Featured |
By Joel Blakley, Business Credit Services
Everywhere you turn, you hear more doom and gloom. Believe it or not, I’m confident and upbeat. I am a firm believer that in every situation, regardless of what the news sources say, there is opportunity. I put together some tips for you to consider. Perhaps one or more of them will help you. Take a look:
1) Get up and fight!
Over the last year, many small businesses have failed. Consumer confidence is very low, and people are less willing to spend on items that aren’t a necessity. We all know this. We hear it every day. In my position at Business Credit Services, I speak to small business owners constantly. I can tell morale is low. I tell these clients that now is the time to seize the day. Your business might be down, but you have to get up and fight for it! Examine everything you do in your business and think of ways to make it more efficient and more effective and make the absolute most out of every single customer contact.
2) What differentiates you from your competition?
Now more than ever, you need a compelling reason for people to use your business. What does your business do to stand out? What single thing do you do better than everyone else? Why would it be a huge mistake for a customer to use your competitor instead of you? Those are all questions for which you need to have very compelling answers. Everything your company does, from advertising and marketing, to the quality of the services you perform, to the way you interact with your customers, needs to embody these things. Your clients need to constantly be left with the feeling they made a great decision to do business with you. If you succeed, you will have lifelong customers. Lifelong customers translate into having a business that is more resilient to economic downturns.
3) Where’s your passion level?
When you get up in the morning, do you still feel passionate about your business? If you do, what makes you love it? If you don’t, why don’t you? It is vital to clearly understand what makes you love working in your business. When you are facing difficult times, it’s easy to feel like you lost that “spark” that drove you to open your business. If it’s gone, you need to recover it. Without it, you won’t be as inspired to make the changes and be as agile with your decisions as you need to be. What changes can you make to your business, and to your personal life, to reignite that spark?
4) Think out of the box? Throw away the box!
I’m not a fan of always doing things the same way. I spent a significant length of time at a very large software company. Many times, I’d suggest ways to improve our services and increase efficiencies. The most common response I’d get was: “We’re not sure we should do that because we’ve always done it another way.” This is possibly the most toxic way for a business to think. For crying out loud, what makes entrepreneurs successful is thinking of different ways to get things done! If Apple Computers thought this way, the IPod would never have taken off. If Boeing thought this way, we’d still be flying propeller planes. If Henry Ford thought this way, we’d be riding horses to work! Worry less about changing the way you do things and concentrate on doing them well.
5) TURN OFF THE NEWS
Can it be any surprise that consumer confidence is lower than anybody can remember? Every time I read the paper or watch the news, I hear about how bad things are. Even our elected officials are telling us the economy could move into a full-blown depression. I’m a pretty calm guy by nature, but when I hear this, it REALLY TICKS ME OFF! What happens to consumer confidence when the very people we elect tell us that the sky is falling? The answer, of course, is that consumers worry more about the economy and spend less. Talk about a self-fulfilling prophecy! Imagine what would happen if our leaders came out and said, “Things are going to get better.” What if the major news services published stories telling us it’s not 1929 all over again? Guess what would happen? THEY’D SELL FEWER NEWSPAPERS! The fact is, reporting good news doesn’t sell as well as reporting the bad. Remember this fact: Fear sells newspapers!
Here are a few facts to make you feel better. According to a Small Business Administration (SBA) fact sheet:
- Half of all private sector jobs are with small businesses.
- 45% of all payroll is paid by small businesses.
- Between 60-80% of net new jobs in the last decade were created by small businesses.
- Half of our Gross Domestic Product (Less Farming) is created by small businesses.
- 52% of small businesses are home based!
Small businesses like yours are what make this economy work!
10 Steps for Creating a Successful Business
February 10, 2009 by admin
Filed under Featured, Starting a Business |
Step 1: Create a Life Plan
Plan your life, then plan your business.
As we always say, plan your life, then plan your business.
Some of the most successful and happy people we know are entrepreneurs who created a business that’s in perfect synchronicity with what they want out of life. If you do what you love, you’ll work harder, better and more happily.
In this step we will focus on:
- Elements of your Life Plan
- Using your Life Plan
Elements of your Life Plan:
Your Current Status
Think carefully and honestly about where you are now in your life. Consider work, recreation, relationships, finances and anything else that’s important to you. And then jot down some simple, succinct bullet points in each of these categories:
- Quality rating of your life on a scale of 1 through 100, with 100 being the best possible life
- Realities of your life, including responsibilities, funds available to start a business, expenses
- Things that make you happy
- Things that make you unhappy
Your Ideal Life This is a snapshot of your “ideal” life, in a very brief, bulleted list. And remember, the sky’s the limit, so don’t be afraid of being bold or maybe even a little grandiose. Factor in things like family time, hobbies, charity work, early retirement – anything that gets you really excited.
Your Loves: What You Really Like Doing
Think about the types of things that you love to do, whether at work, at home, or at your local soup kitchen. List these things out briefly. And don’t worry if some themes are starting to repeat in each section, that just means you have some really focused ideas about what you want in life!
Your Skills & Capabilities: What You Do Well
List the abilities, experience and strengths you can build on to attain that ideal life.
Bear in mind that your skills need not be strictly from your professional life – list skills developed in your personal life as well. It may be a combination of skills that leads you to a startup that’s best suited to fit your needs.
Your Track Record: What You Have Experience Doing
List those accomplishments in your professional and personal life of which you’re most proud. Pay particular attention to successes you’ve had that would be helpful in starting a business and managing it successfully.
Your Ideal Work Style: Whether full-time or part-time, at-home or on the road, working behind the scenes or interacting with lots of people — understand what your work style priorities are so you can define the best kind of business for you.
Another way to look at this is, what level of risk do you want to take? You may want a relatively low-pressure first-go at entrepreneurship.
Your Manifesto: This is your personal mission, your values and what drives you forward, all wrapped up into a one-page (maximum) statement. To write this, you should draw on everything you’ve already discovered about yourself in steps 1 through 6, and bring it all together into a clear statement of your principles and priorities.
Our example manifesto
Work as Freedom: We think work is about pursuing our dreams, not for the benefit of some nameless, faceless company, but for ourselves. We believe that owning our own business leads to the liberties and freedoms that the forefathers of our country envisioned for us. We’re free to choose the kind of business we conduct. We’re free to choose the way we spend our time. We’re free to choose the people with whom we work. We’re free to set our priorities. Work as Family: We’ve tried to create a workplace environment where employees feel like they’re actually members of a greater family. There’s a sense of common purpose, mutual respect, and deep trust. Everyone should feel important and as though they’re a meaningful member of the collective effort. It’s an environment that empowers people to share in the hard work—and in the benefits. Work as Fulfillment: We’ve made it a priority to ensure that our work gives us a sense of satisfaction. When we wake up in the morning, we can’t wait to get on the phone, get online, and get our team in gear. The work we do is truly the work we love. For us there’s nothing that turns us on more than facing a challenge and transforming it into an opportunity. There’s nothing more thrilling than seeing a customer use our product. There’s nothing more gratifying than helping someone else turn a dream into a real business. And over time, we’ve found that our fulfillment comes as much from the process of trying to achieve our goals as it does from actually achieving them.
Key Moves to Get You Where You Want to Go
These are simple strategic action items you must develop in order to transform your Life Plan from a self-assessment into an action plan. At this point in life planning, you know where you want to go, what skills you already have, as well as what type of work suits you best. Draw from that information a list of moves you’ll need to make to achieve your ideal life.
It’s very important to print your Life Plan and keep it in plain view. You’ll find that its presence—even in your peripheral vision—will constantly remind you of what you want, what’s important, and what to do next.
Ideally, you should also revisit your Life Plan periodically to measure your success and to make adjustments and additions where appropriate. It’s okay if things change over time—life is a fluid and dynamic thing and your Life Plan should be, too!
Use your Life Plan to provide context for strategic decisions you make—including what niche you choose to operate in, what business model you’ll use, whether you’ll have lots of employees or a home-based, one person operation.
Most importantly, your Life Plan will position you to do what you LOVE and that always brings out the best in an entrepreneur.
10 Steps to Excellent Customer Service
February 10, 2009 by admin
Filed under Business Practices, Business Tips, Featured |
We’ve been hearing for years that the United States is becoming a service economy. If that’s true, and our success (or failure) hinges on the way we deliver customer service, why are so many companies so bad at it? You see it in so many companies that deliver services that it no longer is surprising when it happens. We’ve become so used to it that it doesn’t even faze us any more.
Learn to Twitter if you want to stay connected
February 10, 2009 by admin
Filed under Business tech, Featured |
As a chief inspiration officer for San Antonio’s Sales by 5, Nan Palmero is a technology power user. So when he flipped open his Dell laptop last week and saw vertical lines, he shifted into uber-geek mode. He tracked down a YouTube video that displayed the exact problem and called a Dell support technician. “I wanted to email him the video so he could troubleshoot quickly,” Palmero says.
The specialist couldn’t accept an e-mail and, instead, started to submit Palmero’s request into that black hole, otherwise known as the repair request process. Annoyed, Palmero sent out a Tweet on social networking channel Twitter.com
“Dear Dell, I could show your support team EXACTLY what’s wrong with my XPS M1330 if they had youtube access. Apparently, it is a common prob,” Palmero tweeted.
Immediately, Palmero got a response: “@nanpalmero What’s going on with your Dell XPS? Is there something I can assist with?”
Ten minutes later, a technician fixed Palmero’s issue and one of Dell’s Twitter team followed up to ensure his satisfaction.
Palmero’s experience hardly is an anomaly. Corporations all over the world are responding to customer service issues with staff that monitors channels like Twitter and Facebook. It is another avenue to preserve their company’s image and promote their brands.
Receiving excellent and immediate customer service is only one reason to Twitter. Getting familiar with a medium that is taking the world by storm is another.
Trust me, I understand how uncomfortable this makes you. I already struggle to answer my workday e-mails and exigent text messages from one of my four kids: “R u making dinner??” Now, I’m supposed to track hundreds of alternately witty and mundane Tweets? “I just don’t get it. And, for that matter, who cares?” is the collective response from many first-time Twitter users.
Tim Walker, an Austin-based editor and blogger for Hoover’s, says we should care. In a presentation that hit the audience over the head with a Web 2.0 two-by-four, Walker posed the question: “How new are the social media?” His answer: Not new at all. In fact, Walker argues that one of history’s first Tweeters was the late theologian Martin Luther, who died in 1546, a full four and a half centuries before Twitter became a phenomenon. When Luther nailed a copy of the “95 Theses” to the door of a church and the message was printed, copied and distributed like wildfire, he was using a form of social media, Walker says.
Twitter, today, is no different from the earliest letters, telegraph messages, and e-mails. Historically, people always have pressed for new ways to connect and communicate faster, and especially on channels that fly under the radar of the mainstream. Twitter is to computer users what CB radio has been to truckers and lighthouses have been to ship captains.
“Twitter is an easy way to interact with your community,” says Jennifer Navarrete, one of the founders of Social Media Club San Antonio and a social media consultant. “If you are a business, people are talking about you — good or bad and if you’re not participating in that conversation, you’re not promoting or problem solving. Likewise, if they’re not talking about you at all, then they should be.”
If you’re ready to take the leap, here are some steps you to get you started:
• Look up www.commoncraft.com (at the recommendation of Palmero) to watch How-To Twitter videos, which are simple step-by-step explanations using stick figures.
• Go to www.twitter.com and sign up for an account. It’s free. For your settings, make sure you click “See all @ replies” so you can view responses.
• Download a Twitter application to your iPhone or BlackBerry.
• Jennifer Navarrete (@epodcaster) offers up this starter pack of people to follow in San Antonio: @alanweinkrantz, @kr8ter, @calamityjen, @Pandaran, @doing media.
• On the national scene try: @chrisbrogan, @Twalk, @nanpalmero, @BryanPerson and a few I find interesting: @taxgirl, @incspring, @johnlithgow and @iamneurotic.
• Check out tools like Twittersearch, geotweet, and Twittergrader to find out who is Tweeting locally and what they’re chirping about. Use the Tweetdeck to organize your followers into groups like: work, family and current issues.
Hoover’s Walker likens Twitter to a cocktail party, and, indeed, the awkwardness of walking into the virtual lounge is palpable. It’s noisy in there. In one corner, advertising and marketing gurus are jockeying for position by throwing up posts about new Twitter tools. In another corner firms are announcing new products. In between, artists, parents, and animal lovers are getting chummy over life issues and popular movies. There are online snobs who liken novices to “Twitter Tots” and grimace at Twitter blunders through emoticons. Users need to find their own groove.
Like any human interaction, the beauty lies in the serendipitous connections. A business contact hooks you up with a cheaper, more efficient product. A like-minded parent eases your worries. A company representative is so warm and funny that you reconsider your opinion of that giant firm. Or, you simply make a new friend. Twitter is a human knowledge database standing, ready and waiting on your front lawn 24 hours a day, seven days a week. It’s an interactive encyclopedia and global support system on steroids.
Marc Warnke, an Idaho-based author and speaker on social media (@marcwarnke), says this: “It’s critical to understand that Twitter can be a business tool, but if you come to the table with only your business in mind, you will never be set a place to eat,” he writes in his blog. “If someone jumped up on a table and yelled his or her pitch (at a cocktail party), it would be very inappropriate… walk lightly around self promotion. Be helpful, funny and that person who people want to hang around with.”
For your professional life, Navarrete says consider Twitter a virtual Chamber of Commerce mixer or industry networking seminar. “You only go to those once a month, and if you miss it, you miss out on a great chance to meet new people and make new connections,” she says. “This is a 24/7 networking opportunity, it’s free, and it allows you to get to know people before you meet in person. I can’t tell you how many people I’ve met via Twitter and by the time I meet them in person, we’re hugging like long lost friends.”
Last month, Navarrete and colleagues kicked off the first ever San Antonio Social Media Breakfast (http://sanantonio.socialmediaclub.org). San Antonio is the 15th city in the country to form this type of breakfast group where marketers, educators, business owners get together to learn something new about social media and share information. I’ll be there. Look me up @writeontime, and we’ll plod along on this journey together. Not interested. Don’t worry. That crazy new thing called Internet e-mail? It was just a passing fad.
source: San Antonio Business Journal - by Donna J. Tuttle